Folks who may have been following me on Twitter or Facebook last night would be aware that I was watching Canada defeat Sweden in the Junior World Cup of Hockey (or whatever it's called ... WJHC). It was held in Canada's capital (Ottawa) and was Canada's fifth gold in a row (wow!). Why I'm mentioning it here is because of a couple of bits of ClassCon which were dropped in the course of the coverage ... first, as the game wound down, the television folks focussed on a guy standing with a pile of hats which the Canadian's would be putting on after their victory ... they sported a very large V which was glossed for the culturally-challenged as "V for five, V for victory". Then, imagine my jaded eyes' collective surprise as a piece in the Telegraph-Journal (out of New Brunswick) begins thusly:

"No day will ever erase you from the memory of time," reads a line from Virgil's Aeneid inscribed on the Valiants Memorial in downtown Ottawa.


I did not know this about this memorial (which was only unveiled a couple of years ago ... I haven't been to Ottawa since). This was a special memorial to honour a handful of folks whose military service to Canada in the past four hundred years (!) was especially noteworthy. According to the National Capital Commission site:

The Valiants Memorial is a collection of nine busts and five statues and a large bronze wall inscription that reads, “No day will ever erase you from the memory of time” (in Latin: “Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo”), from The Aeneid by Virgil.


Savvy Classicists will recognize the line from book nine, dealing with the Euryalus/Nisus thing ...